E-621

The artist’s practice sets out to reconstruct hyperreal spaces whose images and simulacra produce new belief systems for the viewer. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard defines hyperreality as a regime in which the distinction between the real and its simulation collapses. Signs and images no longer refer to a stable reality; instead, they produce what is taken to be real. His work sits within this shift, examining the ways the real and its spaces are manufactured today. The drawing series E-621 takes this line of thought further. E-621 is the code for monosodium glutamate (MSG), a flavour enhancer often found in Chinese cooking and in some products imported to Mauritius. MSG has been blamed for headaches and for “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” a belief that links eating Chinese food to symptoms that appear afterwards. In these drawings, mascots of imported brands and Mauritian products, which also appear in the video Savat DoDo, are set within hallucinatory, chemical landscapes. These environments carry a whiff of the psychedelic and call up New Age iconography and imagery, restaging the neocolonial questions these movements have raised.